Love remains

Firstly, it should be understood that for me all creativity, all artistic output, is the product of a form of religious ecstasy.

I do not dwell on something that has actually happened to me and document its emotional reality. I am interested in the impossible. My aim is always to invest a single moment of experience with such life and heightened reality that the idea that it should end assumes eschatological significance. The creation and reception of the experience should be a form of trance. The resources to achieve this must be found in inaccessible extremities where one's inner life is welded to the limits of space and time.

This is not to say that this is any better or any worse compared to other approaches. It is simply the case that I am incapable of doing it any other way. Indeed, I am in awe of those who can produce breath-taking works of beauty which are entirely beyond my powers: those songs I would give my right arm to have written, because hearing them reveals how utterly useless my right arm is anyway while attached to me and employed in the usual way.

The second thing to understand is that I believe love is a physical reality, indeed, the only reality. I don't mean that in some vague sense. I have a relatively strong background in the physical sciences. I have degrees in astronomy and physics, information technology, and a PhD in nuclear physics, so I am accustomed as a result of my training to describing reality with consistency and precision.

And when I contemplate the universe with the benefit of this training I realise that the difference between the meaningless and the miraculous is love. A world of meaning is a creation of pure love.

Bearing all that in mind, this is the first poem I have written this year.

Love remains

Words cease,
but love remains.

Breathing stops,
but love remains.

Disintegration and decay leave nothing
to bear resemblance to the departed any more,
yet love remains.

Ashes are adulterated with alien dust,
diluted, depleted of meaning,
swept out of reach,
and made something strange and foreign,
by the all world's waters and its winds,
but love remains.

Time passes,
memories fade,
priorities change,
but love remains.

Cherished keepsakes become trinkets
sold for what they're worth
once they've lost all sentimental value
by generations yet unborn
to whom they are just metal,
but love remains.

Clouds gather in October
over a hill,
where grief once drew mourners to a grave.
That place can no longer be found.
The passage of time has unsanctified this ground,
and only an anonymous love remains.

With tectonic inevitability
we suffer a loss all the greater
for the impossibility of its reckoning.
We read a book
whose pages vanish as we turn them,
a book we forget we ever opened
even as we finish it and set it aside
and close our eyes to sleep,
and in dreams we don't remember
love remains.

And when the world ends,
and all the forests we once cut down
erupt from the ruins of everything we ever built,
to be patrolled by monsters grown fat on our souls;
when every zero sum is settled, every debt repaid;
when entropy slips from its straitjacket,
to prowl empty corridors, muttering
and whispering boasts in the abandoned madhouse,
until everything passes at last to silence,
and the stars finally fall, never to rise again:
then, in the endless night that follows,
all our unremembered dreams are the same dream,
and the mystery of love is finally revealed.